3 Reasons Why You Should Use a TV Antenna

The Federal Communications Commission has mandated that everyone should have access to free television over the airways.

As a result, OTA signals:

Are free to receive

Are found nearly everywhere

Offer unparalleled picture quality that's superior to cable and satellite, since these latter technologies use compression to pack in hundreds of available channels.

You can get this OTA programming by simply installing a TV antenna and hooking it up to your television.

In terms of cost, TV antennas are generally affordable, but you’ll pay for the labor if you hire a professional to install it for you.

A reliable estimate of the cost of installing a TV antenna is around two to three months of cable or streaming services.

How TV Antennas Work

In basic terms, a TV antenna is a set of metal rods (i.e., dipoles) that “catch” electromagnetic waves travelling outwards from a transmission tower.

In the television world, these waves are known as “radio frequency” or RF signals. These are your basic TV signals.

RF signals emanate outwards from a tower like waves rippling away from a stone dropped in a pool.

Each wave starts off strongly, with a certain amount of energy as it travels outwards in a straight line.

But it gradually loses energy — due to distance as well as to being weakened by objects in its path, like forests and hills. Eventually it fades and disappears altogether.

Signal Frequencies: UHF and VHF

As TV signals travel outwards at the speed of light, they’re oscillating like regular waves whose heights and lengths change at a speed known as frequency.

“Frequency” is very important in describing and classifying TV signals. There are two types of frequencies:

Very high frequency (VHF): VHF signals for television are oscillating at a rate of 41 – 250 MHz.

Ultra high frequency (UHF): These oscillate at a rate of 470 – 960 MHz, which is much faster than VHF, with shorter wavelengths as well.

Stepping back to the early days of television, stations used to broadcast analog TV signals on VHF frequencies.

VHF signals travel farther and are less weakened by interference than UHF signals.

But the higher frequencies of UHF provide greater bandwidth for more TV programming.

Digital TV Channels

With the transition to digital TV in 2009, most television broadcasts shifted from VHF to UHF.

While stations had to correspondingly boost their transmission power output to reach the same number of OTA television consumers (due to greater attenuation or loss of UHF signals), they could simultaneously pack more programming into these higher frequencies.

Today, digital TV is broadcast using a system of real and virtual channels.

Real Channels

Real channels (also known as radio frequency, broadcast, or digital channels) are shown in the table below.

A real channel also corresponds to a particular frequency within the UHF or VHF bands.

You might point your antenna towards the southeast quadrant to get six channels.

But if you’re using a unidirectional antenna like a Yagi type, you’ll probably miss the channels in the northeast quadrant.

That’s unless you get a multidirectional antenna (with up to 180-degree reception) — more discussion on these antenna differences below.

200 Mile TV Antennas

Next, you need to look carefully at how far away the transmitters are.

To continue our example, you might have considered pointing your Yagi antenna at the stations in the southeast quadrant.

The rest of the signal report reveals that out of those stations, only one (real channel 18) is less than 50 miles away.

This means you’ll need an outdoor antenna to pick up the rest of those channels.

All antennas sold today are rated for a given maximum range of reception.

But I have my own rule of thumb when assessing an antenna’s ability to pick up distant towers:

When looking at an antenna's range for your situation, you should halve its maximum distance and check whether towers still fall within this range. If not, consider an antenna with greater range.

The reason I halve an antenna’s stated range is because some manufacturers tend to exaggerate the range their antennas offer.

This is especially true if you see antennas offering a range of 150 or 200 miles.

As the curvature of the earth physically limits signal propagation to 60 or 80 miles tops, you’ll be very fortunate to pick up any VHF or UHF TV signals beyond this distance.

However, your antenna reception also depends on the height at which it’s installed.

Given sufficient height (i.e., around 50 feet or higher), you might be able to exceed an 80 mile reception range.

The biggest exaggeration I find is for an indoor antenna to have a nominal range of, say, 150 miles.

Given not only the small size and power of an indoor antenna, but also all the interference factors affecting an antenna installed in your home, I have to say you’ll be lucky to get stations farther than 35 miles out (and with that “150 mile” indoor antenna).

On the other hand, that little antenna might just get more miles if you set it up on top of a 100-foot pole outdoors.

Channel Frequencies

Now let’s take a look at the channels themselves. The real channel numbers in the signal report are associated with certain frequencies.

Going back to the example above, the majority of channels in that southeast quadrant are UHF.

Channel 12 (KSAT-TV) however is high VHF, so you’ll need an antenna capable of high VHF if you want this channel.

So far we’ve been able to extract a lot of useful information from the TVFool.com signal report.

You can get similar information from DTV/maps as well, though it’s presented differently.

Types of Television Interference

Interference is the presence of unwanted signals that distort or disrupt your television reception.

It’s like having a bad guest who spoils a good party.

You may be able to enjoy all your OTA channels despite interference, however, but it’s important to understand the sources that act to weaken, or even suppress your channels entirely.

You can think of these as factors that are:

Outside of your home, such as hills, forests, atmospheric conditions, tall buildings, the use of adjacent or overlapping frequencies for radio communications, and so on

Antenna Gain and Directionality

An antenna with sufficient receptive power can often pick up a signal that’s weakened by both distance and interference.

Antennas are passive receptors, and so their size, shape, and number and placement of elements such as dipoles, reflectors, etc. — in short, their design — provide a certain ability to receive OTA radio frequency transmissions and convert these into electrical power for input into a TV.

This ability is referred to as antenna gain, and is typically measured in decibels (dB) or in some related format, like “decibels relative to an isotropic antenna (dBi)” which for our purposes is really just equivalent to dB. You can often find references to “gain” in antenna review articles both on this site and on others.

For instance the Antennas Direct DB8e has an unamplified antenna gain of 17.4 dBi, which is one of the highest on the market.

The gain of an antenna is associated with its directionality, which describes whether it receives signals from certain directions, or from all directions.

Directionality is important because it means that a “directional antenna” (i.e., uni- or multidirectional) has a certain beam width that gives it more focus in given directions. Such antennas are typically high gain.

On the other side are omnidirectional antennas. These receive signals from all directions, but lack reception focus in any particular direction.

Such antennas typically have low antenna gain, because you can say their directionality is uniform in all directions.

As already mentioned, antenna gain is inherent in its design, and isn’t the result of electrical amplification — if you install an amplifier on the antenna’s coaxial cable to your TV however, then you’ll be adding amplifier gain to the line.

Types of TV Antennas

Let’s now take a look at the three main types of antenna, and understand the differences and similarities of each.

You can pretty much classify all TV antennas in the consumer market in terms of their directionality.

1. Omnidirectional Antennas

Omnidirectional antennas pull in signals from 360 degrees around equally well, provided these are at similar distances away and at similar signal strength.

Because of this lack of directionality focused in any single direction, these types of antennas need unobstructed access to a strong signal.

Indoor antennas are almost always omnidirectional.

Customers typically place these just about anywhere and take less care in positioning them vis-à-vis signal sources, and they’re often amplified to compensate for their low antenna gain.

Pros of Omnidirectional Antennas

360-degree reception of TV signals

Compact in design, and can be mounted in different places around the home

Works well for areas with multiple towers located in very different directions

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